The Harveian Oration, 1873

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THE HARVEIAN ORATION

1873.

• •

• •

BY

GEORGE ROLLESTON, M.D., F.R.S.,

LI NACRE PROFE8SOR 07 ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY,

AND »

FELLOW 07 MERTON COLLEGE, IN THE UNIVER8ITY OF OXFORD.

Hontoon:

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1873.

1

OXFORD:

By K. It. Onrdner, E. ricli-vrd Hall, ud J. H. S

- IOI

TVT5

i*7*

Tt toV axyvfiai
)6vov diieipopcvov to KaKa epya;
<j>avrL y€ fihv oiJra, K€P Mp\ nap^ovl^
BdWoiaav cvbcupoviav
ra Kai tcl <j)€pc(r6ai.

Pindar, Pyth. vii. 19.

TO

GEORGE BURROWS, M.D., F.R.S., D.C.L.,

PRESIDENT OF THE
ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF ENGLAND,

WHOSE OWN ATTAINMENTS,
WHOSE SYMPATHY WITH THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY

AND PROGRESS OF OTHERS,

WHOSE UNSWERVING DISCHARGE OF GREAT, AND WHOSE

CONSCIENTIOUS FULFILMENT OF DETAIL DUTIES,

FURNISHED FOR MANY YEARS A VALUABLE EXAMPLE

TO THE
STUDENTS OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S HOSPITAL,

THIS HARVEIAN ORATION

IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
BY ONE OF HIS FORMER PUPILS.

Oxford, 1873.

THE HARVEIAN ORATION

1873.

Mr. President axd Fellows of the College
of Physicians :— A man whose lot it is to
live away from London may well feel some
diffidence in accepting an invitation to lec-
ture before a metropolitan audience; and,
Sir, when you honoured me by requesting
me to deliver this year's Harveian Oration,
J felt and expressed this natural hesitation.
I wish to record that you pointed out to
ine that my function in Oxford was to
pursue and lecture publicly upon the very
subjects witii which Harvey occupied him-
self; and I suggested to myself that what
could with any propriety form the substance
of a course of lectures in the one place, could,
mutatis mutandis, furnish materials for an
address in the other. I felt besides, that, as
the President of the College of Physicians is
by virtue of his office one of the five electors

to the Linacre Professorship, the Linacre
Professor might seem scarcely justified in
declining an invitation to appear before the
learned body to which in part he owed his
position ; and, though I mention it last, I
felt first of all that a wish expressed to
me, not so much by the official whom I am
now addressing, as by the individual who
now more than twenty years ago introduced
me to Harvey's hospital, and has persist-
ently befriended me ever since, was a wish
which I ought not lightly to disregard. If
now, Sir, I follow an example which you have
often set me, and, without needless preface or
further personal allusions, address myself at
once to the business before me, I shall there-
by pay you the best of all compliments, by
showing you that your teaching has not been
wholly thrown away upon your former pupil.

The time allotted to me I propose to
occupy, firstly, in expounding with all pos-
sible brevity certain advances recently made
in our knowledge of the anatomy and physi-
ology of the circulatory organs; and, secondly,
in giving the as yet unrecorded history of one

of the many attempts to rob Harvey of his
rightful rank in the noble army of discoverers,
which were made in the latter half of the
seventeenth century.

Some of the last, if not the very last, of
the many fruitful experiments which Harvey
performed in the way of interrogating Na-
ture as to the circulation, were experiments
in the way of injection. If the writer of
a work which appeared but some forty-
three years ago. On the Diseases and In-
juries of Arteries 11 , had taken the pains
to repeat those experiments which Harvey
performed more than two hundred and
twenty years ago, and when in his seventy-*
fourth year, we should not have had the
following statement at page 9 of Ms book ;
' I have conceived that the arteries contain
air in an uncombined state, which may
assist in keeping them distended, and in
facilitating the circulation ; but I have not

1 On the Diseases iind Injuries of Arteries, witli the
Operations required for .their Cure ; being the substance
of tie Lectures delivered in tlie Theatre of the Royal
College of Surgeons in the spring of mdcccxxix. By
I. J. Guthrie, F.R.S. London, 1830.

10

been able to prove it.' The fact that Harvey
performed experiments in the way of in-
jection may be unknown to many persons
who are too well informed to conceive that
the arteries may or can, compatibly with the
carrying on of any circulation, contain air
in an uncombined state ; for these experi-
ments are not to be found recorded either
in the treatise De Motu Cordis or in either
of the two letters to Riolanus; which two
compositions were, in the older editions of
Harvey's works, printed as three parts of
a single treatise, under the names of ' Exer-
citatio Anatomica i. De Motu Cordis, etc.,'
' Exercitatio Anatomica ii. De Circulatioue
Sanguinis,' and 'Exercitatio Anatomica iii.
De Circulationc Sanguinis' ; and were, till
the appearance of the College of Physicians'
edition in 1766, the only published 1 ', as they

h The statement made (by Dr. Akenside ; see Pettigrew,
'Medical Portrait Gallery,' Preface, p. 7, citing- Dr. F.
Hawkins) in the Pruefatio to the College of Physicians'
edition of Harvey's works to the effect that (inly two of
Harvey's Letters had been published prior to the year
1766, is not correct- Horstins, as Harvey's words in the
Epistola Sexta, p. 631 (Harvcii Opera, ed. 1766) show,
when read iu connexion with the Epistola immediately

are still the best-known, records of Harvey's
work and labour upon the circulation of the

preceding it, received three letters from Harvey. By
consulting Horfltius' work referred to by Dr. Akenside,
I. c, I found at pp. 61-65 ^ ne letter, which appears in our
edition as ' Epistola Tertia responsoi'ia Morisono,' published
by Horstius in 1656 with tlie omission of the first six
and a half, and also of the last three and a, half line*.
These lines Harvey hud doubtless ordered bis amanuensis
— a functionary of great importance to one who wrote so
bad a hand (see p. 165, ed. 1 766, or Harvey's own auto-
graph MS. No. 486, Sloanc Coll. British Museum) — ti>
omit when he bade him copy and send to Horstius,
'eadem quae ant ea medieo cuidum Pnrisdeiisi (kg. Morisono
respond crat.' Horstius dues not publish Harvey's letter
(the 'Epistola Quints ' of our edition) of date Feb. 1,
1654-5, DU & appends the last letter of the three (the
' Epistola Sexta' of our edition) to his own answer to
Harvey's earlier communication. I shall henceforward
refer to the College of Physicians' edition of Harvey's
works as ' ed. 1766,' and to Dr. Willis' most valuable
translation id' them, publicheil by tin.- Sydenham Society
in 1847, as 'ed. Willis.' I throw out as a topic for future
discussion the question whether Dr. Willis is right in
following the editions of Harvey's writings of an earlier
date than 1766, in retiiniti!^ the negative in the sentence
(at p. 131 in both his edition and in that of 1766) in the
second epistle to Riolanus which refers to the Critias of
Plato. I think Dr. Willis is right, and that Dr. Lawrence
was wrong; hut to do this it is necessary to sacrifice
Harvey's credit for knowledge of Plato whilst vindicating
the consecutiveuess of his reasoning. Harvey himself

ts

blood. The experiments to which I refer
are put upon record in a letter of Harvey's
to P. M. Slegel, of date 165 1 (see Harveii
Opera, ed. 1766, p. 613 ; ed. Willis, p. 597).
They were undertaken with the object of
giving a final and happy despatch to all the
quibbling objections of Riolanus, ' omnes
Riolani circa banc rem altercationes jugu-
lare;' and they consisted, firstly, in forcing
water from the cava into the right ventricle
whilst the pulmonary artery, the 'vena
arteriosa' of those days was ligatured —
whereby Riolanus' suggestion as to the
permeability or porosity of the interventri-
cular septum was shown to be untenable ;
and, secondly, in forcing water from the
pulmonary artery round into the opened
left ventricle, whereby the lesser circulation
was demonstrated, to use Harvey's own
favourite word, avro^Ca ; or, to use the very
words employed by him upon this very oc-

would prohiibly have accepted this alternative. It is right
to add, however, that so far na my reading of the edition
uf 1766 has carried me, I have come upon no other case
where I have heen forced to think that Dr. Lawrence
may have blundered.

13

casion, by an 'experimentum &<Pvktoi> a me*
(in his seventy-fourth year) 'nuper et col-
legis aliquot praescntibus exploratum.' Sim-
ple as this experiment may seem to us now,
I do not think that any apology is required
for the drawing of attention to it ; for it is
only twenty-eight years ago (see Edinburgh
Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. lxiii. p.
20), that Dr. Sharpey, to whom our Baly
Medal has been so recently and so fitly
assigned, had to perform the very closely
similar experiment of injecting defibrinatcd
blood into the thoracic aorta, with the very
closely similar object of showing that the
force of the heart was sufficient to account
for the passage of blood through the intes-
tinal and hepatic vascular systems — nay, to
perform an all but identical experiment,
adding on to it but the means for estimating
and reproducing the force put out by the
ventricle concerned. If such experiments as
these were necessary in 1845, how much
more necessary must have been the still
simpler experiments of Harvey in 1651 !
At that time, the prestige of Riolanus the
younger ' pressed heavily upon mankind.'

Harvey himself had called that Individual
'anatomicorum coryphaeum' in 1649; and,
in the very year and letter we are dealing
with, he calls him ' celehrem anatomicum.'
And Pecquet, the discoverer of the thoracic
duct, in his work, also of this selfsame year
1651, the Experimenta Nova Anatomica, a
work spoken of by Haller (Bibliothcca Ana-
tomica, i. p. 443) as ' nobile opus et inter
praecipua saeculi decora,' has the following
remarkable passage : 'Ita sentiunt non vul-
garis peritiae medici Harveius, Veslingius,
Conringius, Bartholinus, aliique complures ;
nee melior ipse Joannes Riolanus (quod mi-
rari subit pro eximia viri, qua in rebus
anatomicis caeteros anteivit sagacitate).
Audi hanc in rem illius sententiam.' p. 4,
I. c. This, I think, I will spare you ; but
I will remark that, after this singular — or
perhaps, alas ! not singular— instance of the
blundering judgments which contemporary
writers may pass upon each other, no young
man, nor indeed any old one — for Harvey
was in his seventy-fifth year when lie first
read Pecquet's work (see Ep. Tert. p. 620, ed.
1766; p. 604, ed. Willis) — should overmuch

15

fret if his own age, in his own estimation, do
him scanty justice. Posterity ordinarily — I
do not say always — rectifies these false
judgments; it has done so, at all events,
in the cases of the men so grotesquely
grouped together by Pecquet . Haller, for
example, writing in 1774 (Bibliotheca Ana-
tomica, i. p. 30 1 ), speaks of Riolanus as ' vir
asper et in nuperos suosque coaevos immitis
ac nemini parcens, nimis avidus suarum
laudum praeco, et se ipso fatente anatomi-
corum princeps.' The duty of attacking and
abolishing such a man may, or indeed must
have been, a disagreeable one to his contem-
poraries. They appear to have shirked it :
it was their duty to have faced it, notwith-
standing it might have been disagreeable,

Harvey used for these experiments a
somewhat rough injecting apparatus, ' quem-
admodum in clysteribus injiciendis fieri

' See also, I would add, Gregorius Hoist, the father of
Harvey's correspondent of the same name, in hia Opera
Mmlica, i. p. 83 (1661), where itioknus is spoken of as
' an a torn i corum hujus saeculi fere primura ;' and consult
Hiirtholinus himself, who, in his work De Lacteis Duhia
(1654), refers to ' multis Riolani observutiombus quibus

[l anatoniicam immortal! nomilUB celebritate auxit.'

16

solet' (p. 614, ed. 1766; p. 597, ed. Willis).
The modern experiment which I wish first
to introduce to jour attention, rests for its
accomplishment upon the employment of
the delicate injection-syringe (for Einstich-
ung) of Ludwig, and of the fine soluble
Berlin blue for the substance to be injected.
Here, as in many other instances, our su-
periority to our forefathers rests mainly
or wholly upon our possession of more de-
licate, or upon our command of more power-
ful agents; and the delicate syringe and the
penetrating soluble injection -mass help us
to discoveries and demonstrations impossible
in default of such means; just as the superior
lenses of Malpighi and Leeuwenhoeck helped
them to the discovery and demonstration of
the capillary circulation, unknown to the
discoverer of the makroscopic circulation.
The experiment to which I refer has its re-
sults fairly represented in the accompanying
drawing Fig, 1) of a specimen prepared by
myself at a class-demonstration. It gives a
figure of the lacteals injected, by the means
just specified, as they exist upon the terminal
segment, here widely globular, of the ileum,

IS

upon a single disciform patch upon the com-
mencing colon, and, finally and chiefly, upon
and all around the walls of the colossal ver-
miform appendix of the rabbit. In this latter
place it is but what the Germans call,
and have called (Frey, Das Mikroskop und
die microskopische Technik, 4th ed. 1871,
p. 255), a Kinderspid, to insert the point of
the fine Einstickung syringe charged with
the soluble blue injection just beneath the
peritoneal coat at the caecal end or elsewhere,
when, upon pressing the piston, a reticula-
tion of blue will spread itself over the surface
of the tube, enclosing as islands the solid
substance of the Peyerian follicles. It needs
but a little perseverance in the way of gentle
pressure to cause superficial tubular lym-
phatics to arise into view, and to declare
their true character by their contrast with
and distinctness from the blood-vessels, as
well as by their moniliform character speak-
ing of their richness in internally placed
valves. Passing over the convex walls of
the appendix, they join larger trunks which
run along its mesenteric border ; these larger
trunks in their turn enter the mesenteric

19

glands, and form in their substance retali-
ations strikingly like those formed previously
1 the walls of the intestine around the solid
ubstance of the Peyerian follicle — suggest-
ng thus to the naked eye the similarity, and
by consequence the homology, which a mi-
croscopic examination enables us to prove
to exist between the lymph-sinuses and the
iolid masses they surround in the Peyerian
follicles and in the mesenteric glands re-
spectively d .

It is the demonstration of the relation of
he lymphatic or lacteal vessels, or sinuses,
i the case may be, in different animals, to
he solid ampulla-like masses in the Peyerian

d I take this opportunity of expressing- my surprise
i Henle has not seen his way towards accepting this
v of the real nature or Bedeutung of the Peyerian fol*
In his ' Gefasslelire' of 1868 (p. 404) he refers us
%ck to his ' Eingeweidelehre,' p. 57, of 1862, where, as
the second edition, 1873, p. 62, the absorbent
aracter of these structures is denied, just as it was by
Hyrtl in his ' Handbuch der Topograph is chen Anatomic,'
, p. 646, and by Teichman, ' Das Saugaderaystem,'
, pp. 86-91. The view which I have adopted was
accepted hy a distinguished Fellow of this College, Dr.
Bunion- Sanderson, in the Eleventh Report of the Medical
Officer of the Privy Council for 1868, p. 96.
C 2

20

follicles, which the modern method of punc-
ture can claim as being eminently its own
attainment; for many years ago — in 1784,
in fact — and three years before the appear-
ance of Mascagni's splendid work, with
similar figures and histories of similar ex-
periments {Vasorum Lymphaticorum His-
toria et Iconographia, 1787), the continuity
of the lacteal radicles upon the walls of
the intestine with the 'lymph-paths' — to
borrow a word of later coinage — in the
mesenteric glands, and finally, after passing
through successive lines of these apparently
solid structures, with the thoracic duct itself,
had heen demonstrated by Sheldon, then
Professor of Anatomy in our Royal Academy
of Arts. These are his words (from p. 49 of
his work, Of the Absorbent System, 1 784),
describing his plate No. 5, a copy of which I
have had made and suspended here : ' In the
fifth plate of this work, upon a portion of
human jejunum from an adult female sub-
ject, seventeen lacteal vessels are injected
with quicksilver, by inserting pipes into
them upon the intestine. They were re-
markably large and varicose in this subject,

21

and as the quicksilver was poured into the
lymphatic injecting-tube to fill these vessels,
it frequently ran out in a full stream by the
jugular vein, which was opened. This cir-
cumstance rendered it evident that the mer-
cury had passed through the whole course of
the lacteals and thoracic duct, and had pene-
trated even into the venous system. It is,
I believe, the only instance in which the
thoracic duct has been injected from the
lacteals on the intestines e .

a I have some pleasure in pointing out that by making
a reference to the plates of the venerable Professor Arnold,
Fase. i. Tab. i. fig. a, 1838, it may be seen that the quick-
silver injection could sometimes give as correct results as
the 'silver method' of modern micro-soupy for the detection
of lymphatics by their epithelium. The figure I refer to
shows the fourth ventricle plexus without, the velum in-
terpositum, on the contrary, with, lymphatics injected with
quicksilver. The use of the silver method has enabled un-
to prove that this representation is correct : abundance of
choroidal villi can be procured, and very beautiful objects
they are when treated with 0.25 percent, solution of nitrate
of silver, from the plexus in the fourth ventricle, but no
lymphatic vessels. These can be shown from the velum
interpositum by the use of the same reagent. The use of
quicksilver as an injection -substance has not always led
to as happy results as in the instance jus! given. Not to
specify other eases, it is curious to note that the penetra-

Sheldon's first plate, I may add, when
compared with his letter-press on p. 37,
appears to show that what he calls 'am-
pullulae' were really Peyerian glands, and
that he had repeatedly seen these glands
distended in the way of natural injection
with chyle, as it is easy enough to see them
distended in an animal, such as a rat, which
can be got to feed on fatty food, and can be
killed at a proper interval of time after-
wards. He appears to have had very seri-
ous as well as reasonable doubts as to the
existence of any foramen in the apices of
these ' ampullulae ' ; but the authority of
Lieberkulm, whose Dissertatio Anatomica
(p. iS) he had himself edited, appears to
have weighed with him more than his av-
ro^rta. Near, therefore, as Sheldon came to
seeing the whole truth, he just failed of

tii>n of this material into the porieto-splanchnic ganglion
of tlie Lame 1 lib raucl data when thus employed by the
skilful Italian aiiatninitt, l'uli, ami its distributing itself
thence into the nerves given off from it by diaplaeemeut
of their granular neurine, seduced him into supposing
these structures to constitute a lymphatic Bystem, ' cis-
ternam lacteam et vasorum lactiferorum surculos.' See
Teetacea Utriusque Siciliae, torn. i. p. 39, 1791.

23

doing so entirely and completely ; and the
views which Lieberkiihn had put forward
(p. 10, loc. cit.) as to the great number of
he Peyerian glands in the lower segment
of the small intestines, being a proof that
hey held relation to secretion or excretion
rather than to absorption, prevailed and
have prevailed, even into our own day.
These are Lieberkiihn's words : ' Quare ad
finem ilei plures quam in integro intestino
positi erunt ? Nonne propter faeces jam-
judum exsuccas et indurescentes ut lubri-
catae valvulam facile transeant nee laedant V
In Hcnle's ordinarily and marvellously ex-
cellent Generelle Anatomie, of date 1841, I
find (p. 895) the excretory character of the
Peyerian follicles taken as something cer-
tain ; the only thing left uncertain being
the question as to whether their contents
found their way into the cavity of the in-
testine by a constantly patent, however
small, duct, or by dehiscence, as ova from
an ovary. In 1850 the real meaning, the
true physiological import, of these glands
was proved by Briicke. The method of in-
jection, of which I have spoken, enables us

24

to demonstrate or exhibit what was then
proved, and that with the greatest ease. It
is difficult to understand how any one can
now doubt that the Peyerian glands are
really but the pileorrhizae of the roots,
the glands the tubera and the thoracic duct
the trunk or stem of the absorbent tree.

If any apology be needed for my dwelling
so long upon a point of anatomy which has
not merely much historical, but also much
practical, interest — the Peyerian glands being
the part of the organism especially affected
by the poison of typhoid fever, which I see
has, amongst other aliases, that of ' Peyerian
fever' (Walshe, On Diseases of the Heart,
3rd ed. p. 208) — I would add that I was till
recently under the impression that the actual
demonstration, the doing, of that which my
Fig. 1, p. 17, represents as done, might have
been a fitting exhibition for me to go through
iipon the present occasion, following herein
the example of Harvey, 'viliora animalia
in scenam adducentis.' I have, however,
learned that this very demonstration on
the appendix vermiformis of the rabbit has
been often performed in Germany, and,

25

indeed, also in England; and I judged, con-
sequently, that it might be superfluous, as
it would not he novel, to exhibit it here
and now.

Having been thus disappointed in my in-
tention of demonstrating something new in
this direction, I cast about in another for
something of the same character. And in
the heart of a bird, the Australian Casso-
wary (Casuarius australis), killed at Rock-
ingham Bay, lat. 18 deg.; on the east coast
of that continent, and sent me by my former
pupil, J. E. Davidson, Esq., I came upon a
structure which I am well assured has never
been either described or figured before. It
:sses upon this ground some claim upon
our attention ; but it possesses stronger
claims than any which mere rarity could
give it, being a structure which, though it
has never been seen in any other member of
the class Aves, is largely developed, and.
indeed, exactly reproduced in the hearts of
certain mammals, and does not fail to be
represented, at least rudimentarily, in our
own. The structure in question is a 'mo-
derator' band, holding precisely the same

/ JBk

W 1 H

sBEP

£1 :.i

/ / m
II I

_;/'" ,;

\ ; ^^^K -

Fig. 2.— Heart of Sheep.

The right ventricle is laid open. Tlie

letter M indicates tin

: moderator

band. A probe has Wen

passed between the ch'inlae ttituiineue, |>«.--.'.„- from a niui-

oulua papillaris arising

from the mi

»vable wall «f toe ventricle

to the two main segme

nts of the tricuspid valves and tbe outer

wall of the ventricle.

27

relations to the other parts of the right ven-
tricle in this bird which the band so named
by Mr. T. W. King in the Guy's Hospital
Reports, vol. ii. p. 122, 1S37, holds in many,
if not in all, Ungulate mammals. This, I
presume, is made plain by a comparison of
the two diagrams (Figures 2 and 3) show-
ing, one of them the heart of this bird, the
other the heart of a sheep, with the right
ventricle similarly laid open in each case.
The advantage, which in the struggle for
existence, and specially in that very com-
mon phase of it which takes the form of
a race for food or from an eater, which an
animal with such a muscular band passing
directly across the cavity of its right ven-
tricle from its fixed to its movable wall must
possess, is not a difficult thing for any man
to understand who has ever either watched
in another or experienced in himself the dis-
tress caused by the over-distension of any
muscular sac f . A band of similar function

f Since writing as above I have been reminded of what
I ought not to have forgotten, vi». that my friend Dr.
Milner Fothergill has discussed this very subject in his
work, The Heart and ite Diseases with their Treatment,
London. 187a, p. 6.

2! >

— I do not say definitely of precisely the
same morphological importance — has often
been figured as existing in the hearts of
most or all Reptilia below Crocodilina ; and
it serves in them to close up and expel the
blood from the pulmonary compartment of
their imperfectly divided ventricle.

Such being the function of this moderator
band, what is its morphological bearing, and
what traces can we find of it in ourselves,
tempting us to speculate as to the nature of
the secret bond which brings us into rela-
tions of affinity not only to the mammalian
class, but with an older stock, the many-
sided potentialities of which embraced not
only mammals, but all warm-blooded animals,
and not only all warm-blooded creatures, but
warm-blooded animals and reptiles also? The
valves of the heart in the higher vertebrata,
when regarded from this point of view of
development — -the safest if not the sole cri-
terion of homology— may be spoken of as
being but trabeculae flaked off from the inner
surface of the wall of a muscular sac, and
subsequently made more or less membran-
ous in the way of specialisation and its

correlative economy. Thus, as Gegenbaur
(Vergleichende Anatomie, 2nd edition, p. 836)
has remarked, the intervalvular space in
these animals corresponds to the entire
cavity of the spongy walled heart of fishes
and amphibia; and the sinuous intertra-
becular cavities in the spongy walls of these
latter animals correspond with the chief
part — viz. the extravalvular part of the
ventricular space — in mammals, birds, and
Crocodilina. Now, the musculi papillares
represent the disposal or destination of the
innermost layer of the right ventricle, ac-
cording to Dr. Pettigrew (see his paper, Phil.
Trans. 1864, p. 479); and I would submit
that the moderator band is but a specialisa-
tion of the next layer in order from within
outwards — to wit, Dr. Pettigrew's sixth
layer, which he has figured (Plate XIV.
%■ 33) as proceeding in a spiral direction
from right to left, much as the fibres of
the moderator bands I have figured do.
A study of the heart of the rabbit will
put this matter in a very clear light, and
further open our eyes to see and recog-
nise the rudimentary representation of this

83

moderator band in our own hearts. If we
look at the outer aspect of that very constant
musculus papillaris, which passes in man
from the outer and movable wall of the right
ventricle to distribute its chordae tendineae
to the two more anteriorly placed of the
three segments of its auricular valve, we
shall frequently see that its longitudinal
fibres are crossed nearly or quite at right
angles by a slender fibrous band, so that
we have before us an appearance not wholly
nor essentially unlike that presented by the
striae longitudinales of Lancisi and the fibres
of the corpus callosum when viewed in their
mutual connexion. This band of fibres can
sometimes be traced up towards the conus
arteriosus, and be seen not to die away until
close upon the point of origin of the most
anteriorly or upwardly placed of the chordae
tendineae which arise from the septum to
pass to the hindermost of the three segments
of the tricuspid. The points between which
this line of fibres lies may be observed to
be the very same as those between which
the moderator bands in the Cassowary and
the Sheep stretch as free columns in the

33

diagrams before you. " It is not altogether
rare to see this band raise itself from the
position of fusion, like the ventricular wall,
and assume the character of a cylindrical
band for a lesser distance, but with no less
distinctness as a column, than in the Un-
gulata. Such a case I had actually before
me whilst writing this, and you have it now
figured before you (Fig. 4) s.

Every gradation, in fact, exists between
the entire obsolescence of the moderator

e Since this oration was delivered I have received two
communications relating to the presence of a moderator
band in the human heart. One of these, from my former
pupil, J. C. Galton, Esq. F.L.S., was accompanied by a
sketch in which a moderator band was drawn as passing
1 human heart from the insertion into the movable
wall of the ventricle and the very constant museulus
papillaris supplying what I would call the 'canal' and
' dextrad' cusps of the tricuspid, to an origin on the inter-
ventricular septum, sending a root up to the point of
in of one of the chordae tendineae of the third cusp,
called 'septal' by Mr. Galton. See also Mr. Galton's
Letter to British Medical Journal, July 36, 1873, p. 83.
I have to thank Dr. Headlam Greenhow for a reference
1 another notice of the presence of a moderator band in
a human heart. It will be found in an interesting paper
of his in the Transactions of the Pathological Society,
xsi. 1870, p. 88.

band, which we sometimes see in the human
heart, through the typical, and I should an-
ticipate, constant, but not functionally im-
portant, representation of it in the rabbit,
up to the important and structurally promi-
nent development attained to by it in the
Ungulate mammal, and this solitary instance
for the class of Birds, and the sub-class with
such generalised affinities, of Struthiones.

And, speaking of the method of gradations,
I take this opportunity of saying that its
application in the case of the muscular right
auriculo-ventricular valve of birds will, in
my judgment, put an end to the disputes
which have taken place as to its homology
with one or other of the two valves in the
crocodiles. The two portions of the valve
in the Casuarius australis are so nearly
equal — -the larger being 17 inch, as against
1*4 of the smaller— as to do away with the
difficulty which might be felt in holding that
both Crocodilian valves are represented here.
There are other reasons for this view, which
I reserve for another occasion. But whilst
speaking of the heart of the Bird, I cannot
forbear pointing out how the structural ar-

rangemenis of its auricle, differing as they
do strikingly from those of the same com-
partment in the mammalian heart, help us
by that contrast to get a true idea of the
working of this latter. Firstly, the walls of
the Bird's right auricle are relatively thicker,
not only as compared with the Malls of its
own ventricle, but also as compared with the
walls of the corresponding auricle in the
Mammal, the musculi pcctinati standing out
in as sharp relief as the similarly working
muscular ridges in a hypertroplued bladder,
and inclosing anfractuosites and recesses
almost as deep. But, secondly, and what
is of more importance, the Bird's auricle is
furnished with a large and functionally ac-
tive yalve, protecting the entrance of the
great veins, and preventing regurgitation
into those vessels just as the auriculo-ven-
tricular valves prevent regurgitation from the
ventricles. It is fair to argue & priori that
if the Mammalian auricle had counted for
as much in the action of the heart as the
Bird's, its force would have been economised
by the placing of a large and functionally
useful valve in the site of the rudimentary

D 2

Eustachian — a structure altogether absent
in many mammals, and variable, as rudi-
mentary structures very often are, in our-
selves. The d priori argument of Com-
parative Anatomy is abundantly borne out
by the appeal to experiment. Marey, in his
' Physiologie Me"dicale de la Circulation du
Sang,' 1863, whilst referring (p. 36) to other
evidence from Comparative Anatomy than
that which I have adduced, cites, in support
of the view that the auricle has but an
accessory and subordinate rdle in the func-
tions of the heart, an experiment of Chau-
veau's, in which the auricle of a horse, being
exposed and irritated, lost its contractile
power for a time, during which, neverthe-
less, the ventricles continued to contract
and the circulation to be maintained. Colin,
again (Traite de la Physiologie Comparee,
vol. ii. p. 257, 1856), found that the left
ventricle continued to be filled with blood
even when the corresponding auricle was
prevented from contracting by the insertion
into it of a finger. And further, Magendie
had long ago noted, in experimentation,
what many here present may have noted

37

in pathological or clinical observation— viz.
that the auricles may remain extremely
distended for hours, and, like other mus-
cular sacs similarly conditioned, unable to
contract and empty themselves, without the
circulation for all that being; brought to a
standstill. It was Dr. Pavy's paper, treat-
ing (in the Medical Times and Gazette of
November 21, 1857) of the case of a man
(E. Groux) with a congenital fissure of the
sternum, which first drew my attention to
these points ; and his summary of what
takes place in the dog is so clear that I
herewith reproduce it.

' In the dog, the contraction of the ven-
tricles is sharp and rapid, instead of pro-
longed, as in the reptile, and does not appeal'
to occupy nearly so much time as half the
period of the heart's action. The ventricular
contraction communicates a sudden impulse
to the auricles, occasioning in them a dis-
tinct pulsation, which is instantly followed
by a peculiar thrill, wave, or vermicular
movement, running through the auricular
parietes down towards the ventricle. This
thrill or wave is coincident with the r

38

of the blood from the auricle into the ven-
tricle, and takes place so instantaneously
after the ventricular contraction, that the
one movement appears to run on to continue
itself into the other. There is then a pause,
which seems comparatively of considerable
duration, and which is succeeded by a re-
commencement of the heart's action, begin-
ning with the ventricular contraction.'

Dr. Pavy has very kindly gone to the
trouble of repeating the experiment upon
which these statements are based ; and
from a letter with which he has favoured
me, I gather that the auricular contraction
detectable by the cardiographic tracing, as
immediately preceding the ventricular con-
traction, is also detectable, of course during
the pause just mentioned, by the eye, un-
assisted by the cardiograph, and turned
simply upon the exposed heart, in which
the auricular appendix is seen to become
redder or more flesh-coloured at the moment
in question. And he further remarks that
this auricular contraction, difficult 11 though

h I appreheud that Dr. Walshu's account of the auscul-
tatory phenomena as occurring under normal conditions

39

it be to be observed under physiological
conditions, may be exaggerated into con-
siderable prominence in disease entailing
contraction of the auriculo- ventricular ori-
fices, and may then make itself known by
a presystolic murmur.

I should now be glad to draw attention
shortly to a few memoirs which have ap-
peared comparatively recently, and which
treat of matters of considerable interest, not
merely as scientific problems, but also as
practical questions. First among these I
would name the paper which appears in the

I third volume of Professor Ludwig's 'Ar-
beiten,' 1868 (having previously appeared in
vol. xx. of Bericht Math.-Phys.-Klass. K. S.
Gesellsch. Wissensch., Leipzig), by Professor
Ludwig himself and Dr. Dogiel. In this
paper we have a number of experiments
recorded as performed with the hearts of
dogs removed from the body, and as nearly

will he accepted as correct. It rnna thus (Diseases of the
Heart anil Great Vessels, 3rd ed. 1862, p. 65): 'Id the
normal state the blood enters the ventricles from the
.riciea with a current so calm ae to prevent audible sound
from being thereby produced in the former cavities.'

40

as possible emptied of blood ; and the con-
clusion which the authors come to is that
the heart of the dog, when removed from
the body and emptied of blood, still pro-
duces a sound during the systole of the
ventricles whicli is not essentially different
from that which is recognised as the normal
first sound of the heart. The authors add,
however (p. 85), that they do not think these
experiments entirely exclude the possibility
of the tension of the auriculo-ventricular
valves entering as a factor into the produc-
tion of the first sound ; and hereby they
would be guarded from coming into con-
tradiction with most English authorities —
as for example, Dr. Walshe (Diseases of the
Heart, 3rd ed. 1862, p. 62). Dr. Guttmann,
however, in a paper of no great length, but
of considerable merit, published subsequently
to the one just mentioned, and in Virchow's
Archiv for 1869, points out with much
acnteness what, when once pointed out, is
ever thereafter obvious — viz. that it is, in
the nature of things, impossible, with all
possible precautions in the way of emptying
the heart of blood, to empty the complex

I phenomenon made up by a systole of the
heart of the condition of tension of the
auriculo- ventricular valves. Surely the mus-
culi papillares will contract with the rest
of the ventricular walls, and, contracting,
will they not stretch the chordae tendineae
and the valves 1 For myself, I would say
that we are more likely to overrate the
share taken by the valves than to underrate
that taken by the muscular walls. I need
not say to this audience that the fact with
which we are all familiar, of the alteration
in the first sound produced by disease of
the auriculo -ventricular valves, does not
absolutely prove that they produce any part
!of it during health ; and, finally, to my own
ear at least, a modification of Wollaston's
experiments, which anybody can try for
himself by making his temporal and mas-
seter muscles contract at anytime of perfect
stillness, appears to produce a sound which
is scarcely, if at all, different in quality from
the first sound of the heart. A judgment.
however, upon the nature of a sound, or,
indeed, an aggregation of sounds, as in
music, is one upon which two observers may

very well differ, as neither of them can lay
his proof of supposed identity or difference
alongside of that which the other may pos-
sess, or may suppose lie does.

It is with much pleasure that I refer to
Dr. Rutherford's paper on the Influence of
the Vagus on the Vascular System, which
appears in the Edinburgh Royal Society
Transactions for 1870, vol. xxvi. In that
year, having to deliver an address to the
Biological Section of the British Association
at Liverpool, I made bold to say that the
results to which Dr. Rutherford had come,
and which were then only known to me in
an abstract in the Cambridge and Edinburgh
Journal of Anatomy and Physiology (May
1869, p. 402), would prove to be of the
highest value and importance. His memoir
now published in extenso, and extending over
forty-two pages, as fully justifies my predic-
tion as it will fully repay any one who will
take the pleasant trouble of reading it. The
most important result in a practical point of
view is the demonstration which Dr. Ruther-
ford has given of the nerve-circle, whereby,
in the way of reflex action, tiie all-important

/secretion of gastric juice is called forth. The
sensory impulse caused by the ingestion of

/food into the stomach, is propagated upwards

i by the vagi to the medulla oblongata, where it
throws into abeyance the vaso-motor nerve-

i cells, which, whilst the stomach is empty,
keep the blood-vessels of the gastric mucous
membrane constricted, but which, when then-
activity is inhibited, allow the zonular fibre-
cells of these blood-vessels to dilate, and
allow the increased afflux of blood thus

\called for. I That relief will result to some
of the countless martyrs to dyspepsia out
of the demonstration of this physiological
relation of vagus, sympathetic, and peptic
glands, I do not doubt, Possibly, I would
add, Owsjannikow's observations as to the
working of hydrate of chloral as a depressor
of arterial tension (Ludwig's Arbeiten, 1872,
p. 32) may prove valuable to persons en-
i in practice, by pointing out, in how-
ever shadowy a fashion, the road to a more
rational and systematised, even if less general
use of this drug than that which I am told is
now made of it. It may seem a paradox, but
it is none the less true for all that, to say that,

for the activity of many organs, a paralysing
and inactivity of certain nerve-centres in con-
nection with them is a prerequisite. The ac-
tivity of such, indeed of most, organs is but

I intermittent and occasional, being but inter-
mittently and occasionally called for, whilst
the constringing activity of the sympathetic
has to be constantly at work to prevent waste
of force '.

Owsjannikow's paper (also to be found in
Ludwig's Arbeiten, 6tli year, 1871, and in the
Bericht Math.-Phys.-Klass. K. S. Gesellsch.
Wissench., Leipzig) just referred to, and pub-
lished two years subsequently to Dr. Ruther-
ford's, gives, as the result of a number of
experiments performed in Professor Ludwig's
laboratory at Leipzig on rabbits, and inde-
pendently at St. Petersburgh on cats, the con-

l elusion that the ganglionic centres of inner-

i The phenomenon of the distension of the corpora

! cavernosa, a, phenomenon used by Harvey himself in the
way of illustration (p. 129 of the Epistola Seeunda ad
H.ioknimi), I may adduce in the way of illustration also,
being-, as it is, dependent upon a similar nervous me-
chanism ; and being shown so unniistakeably, in eases
where ii. follows lesiinis in the nuelial legion, to result from

of 11

■ve-ceiitrcs situated there or thereabouts.

45

th

ration for the entire sympathetic system
occupy but a small space at the base of
the brain, two strips to wit, one on eacli
side of the median fissure in the floor of
the fourth ventricle ; of, in the rabbit,
length of about four millimeters, beginning
about four or five millimeters anteriorly to
the calamus scriptorius, and ending about
one or two millimeters behind the level of,
the corpora quadrigemina. The title of such
a book as Eulenburg and Guttmann's Die
Pathologie des Sympathicus auf Physiolo-
gische Grundlage (Berlin, 1873,) is an en-
couragement to those who hope to see fruit
arise from such researches as these in the
way of additions to our means for meeting,
or at least understanding, human disease
and suffering.

v It has long been known (Budge, 1855) that
the sympathetic nerves which supply the
vessels of the head and iris do not pass
directly or by the shortest possible route to
this their distribution, but pass down the
spinal cord for a greater or lesser distance,
and then turn outwards, and pass from
the anterior nerve-branches to bend upwards,

much as the recurrent laryngeal nerve does.
That other vascular regions receive their
vaso-motor supply by this apparently cir-
cuitous and, till the history of development
is taken into consideration, paradoxical route,
is from time to time being demonstrated.
Dr. Pavy, to whom I have already referred,
many years ago identified and mapped out
one segment of the road along which nerve-
force passes to the liver and prevents or
allows the Occurrence of diabetes. Fur-
ther exploration of this route we owe to
Cyon and Aladoff (Bulletin de rAcademie
Imperiale des Sciences de St. Petersburg,
torn, xvi, p. 307 ; British Medical Journal,
December 23, 1871); and this same investi-
gator, working still in the same line of
investigation, as it is in these days usually
necessary for an investigator to work if he
will make himself a name as a discoverer,
has also shown us (Ludwig's Arbeiten, 3rd
year, 1868) the track along which the vaso-
motor nerves of the anterior limbs pass,
proving that these nerves pass down in
the spinal cord as low as the mid-dorsal
region before leaving it to turn upwards in

he sympathetic chain to join the brachial

plexus.

\ Of all the results, however, which have
been attained to in the line of experimenta-
tion now under consideration, those come to
by Brown -Se"quard and demonstrated by
him at the meeting of the British Associa-
tion held at Liverpool in 1870, and subse-
quently published in the Lancet of January
7, 1871, seem to me to he certainly the most
striking and possibly the most important.
Could anything have been more surprising
to him whose memory we here this day
commemorate, than to have been told that
an injury to a particular part of the brain,
the pons, called after the excellent anatomist
whose life ended in the very year in which
his had begun, would produce haemorrhage
in certain parts of the lungs, and anaemia,
oedema, and emphysema in others? This is
an easy experiment to repeat; it is one
which might have been done in the days of
Harvey as easily as in those of Bernard,
of Budge, of Ludwig, and of Brown- Se"quard.
But easy though it would have been to
rform, I am bold to say it was well for

48

Harrey that he never happened to per-
form it. For considering that, like Hal-
Ur. he knew nothing of the contractility of
arteries ; considering that Hunter had not
perforated his now well-known experiments
with the umbilical arteries ; considering,
Sir, that in that excellent work on Physio-
logy by Johannes Miiller, the translation of
which in 1838, by our late and never suffi-
ciently to be lamented friend Dr. Baly, we
owe to .your suggestion, I find several pages
(vol. i, pp. 202-206, 214-219, ed. 1840)
devoted to disproving the muscular con-
(ructility of arteries; considering, that it
RH not till three years later, in 1841,
that llciile's work, already referred to, ap-
peared with its still unsuperseded figures,
I'l.-iti' III. figures 8, 9, and 10 of the arteries
with their circular muscular coat, and with
its excellent summary in letterpress of the
whole subject, pp. 518-526, and especially
pp. 524, 525; when I consider that nothing
of all this had been done, to leave unmen-
lioned other advances connected with names
of men vet living to speak for themselves
;iiul tor us — 1 say it may have been well >

49

hat Harvey never came upon the facts ref-
lating to the alterations of lung -substance
being entailed by destruction of brain-sub-
stance, not difficult to be observed and re-
produced, which we owe to Brown-Sequard,
For if he had come upon them, how could
he have explained them in the absence of
the entire chain of connecting facts, in the
forging of which chain so many successive
workers — Purkinje, Valentin, Weber, Bur-
dach, Stilling, and others — have all contri-
buted links? Might not even Harvey, often
as he withstood such temptations, have,
nevertheless, in default of power to assign
the real causes of such a phenomenon, been
driven back upon some of those explana-
tions which he himself so forcibly denounces
in the words (Epistola Secunda ad Riolanuni,
p. 116), 'Vulgo scioli cum causas aasignare
haud norunt dicunt statim a spiritibus hoc
fieri et omnium opifices spiritus introducunt,
et ut mali poetae ad fabulae explicationein
et catastrophen dtbv d-n-b fi^ayijs advocant in
scenam.' It is a hard thing for any man to
abstain from speculating as to the cause of
any well-established phenomenon, especially

50

if it be of striking interest and importance ;
it is a hard thing for any man to do more
than keep pace with his own generation ;
and those who have spent any time in read-
ing the works of Harvey's contemporaries,
will best appreciate the difficulty he must
have had in setting himself free from the
influence of the idola theatri referred to.

I pass from this reflection to an exposi-
tion of the claims which have been put
forward on behalf of Walter Warner, the
editor in 1631 of Harriott's Algebra, to the
discovery of the circulation of the blood ;
and I do this by a natural transition, Walter
Warner having been a man in whose mind,
all his mathematics notwithstanding, the
idola in question greatly abounded. War-
ner's claims are alluded to by Dr. Willis in
a note to his excellent Life of Harvey (see
p. lxiv). They are put forward by Anthony
Wood, upon the authority of Dr. Pell, a man
distinguished as one of Oliver Cromwell's
diplomatists, and afterwards as an assiduous
supporter of the then young Royal Society ;
and upon that of Dr. Morley, some time Dean
of Christ Church, and afterwards Bishop of

51

Winchester (see Wood, Athenae Oxonienses,
vol. i. p. 461, 2nd ed. 172 1 ; vol. i. p. 302, ed.
Bliss). Aubrey, a contemporary of Wood's,
appears, from a note at p. 417 of the second
volume of his Lives of Eminent Persons, to
have had the same story from Izaak Walton,
who gave Dr. Morley again as his autho-
rity ; and Aubrey repeats the tale with cer-
tain additions, and notably with that of
Dr. Pell's authority, at p. 577 of the same
volume. The same story was pointed out
to me by one of the officials in the Bodleian
Library as being given in an anonymous
biographical Miscellany to be found in the
Rawlinsonian Collection, B 158, pp. 152-153.
This MS. appears to be of the latter half of
the seventeenth century, and its legend runs
to the following effect. A certain Henry, Earl
of Northumberland* being imprisoned in the
Tower, did, for the better passing of his
time, get several learned persons to live
and converse with him; one of these men
(whom, Aubrey tells us, I. c. p. 368, the world
called the Earl of Northumberland's magi)
was ' Mr. Warrener.' And the MS. proceeds,
' He was the inventor, probably, of the cir-

E 2

52

culation of the blood, of which subject he
made a treatise, consisting of two books,
which he sent to Dr. Harvey, who epitomised
and printed them in bis own name ; he
usually said that Dr. Harvey did not under-
stand the motion of the heart, which was

a perfect hydraulik Dr. Pain, that

very ingenious and learned canon of Christ
Church, told me that he had seen and
perused this book of Warrener's.' Finally,
the excellent Biographia Britannica has em-
balmed Wood's and Aubrey's story, in the
articles 'Harriott' and 'Harvey,' pp. 2542
and 2550, ed. 1757. Many & priori impro-
babilities will at once be seeu to attach to
this story, and it is easy enough to discredit
more than one of the witnesses. But I have
better than indirect evidence to bring for-
ward, and I will have the agreeable mental
exercise of excogitating it to the ingenuity of
my hearers, which ingenuity will he sharp-
ened, no doubt, by their regard for their own
Harvey, and strengthened by the belief that

' Whatever records spring to light,
He never shall he shamed. 1

I may be asked, after this quotation, why

53

I should have thought it worth while to in-
vestigate Walter Warner's claims at all. I will
shelter myself, in the first instance, behind
the example of Sir George Ent, who, feeling
and acting by Harvey as Launcelot in his
better days felt and acted by Arthur, took
similar pains to set aside the similar fable
as to Harvey's indebtedness to Father Sarpi.
And, in the second place, I will remind my
hearers that it was but as recently as 1838
that an article appealed in the London and
Westminster Review, in which the claims of
the Italian monk just mentioned were once
again brought forward with surprising con-
fidence, plausibility, and ignorance.

It was possible, I thought, that the same
paltry but evil spirit which animated Dutens
in writing his Inquiry into the Origin of
the Discoveries attributed to the Moderns
(1 767 *), and in coming to the conclusion

k Dutens was as well acquainted with the excellent
work of William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and
Modern Learning, published in 1694, on the other side
of the question, as a little hitter mind can ever be with
u work or the working of a noble and generous one. His
repeated references to it show this, as also the unim-
provable character of his shallow poverty-stricken spirit.

54

that every great man in modern times had
been anticipated by somebody or other in
ancient ones, might still be going about in
dry places, and might wholly enter into and
entirely fill up the soul of some small an-
tiquary, ■who, coming under such inspiration
and guidance upon the passages which I
have collected, might proceed to instruct
the literary public as to Warner's claims.
Whilst considering what indirect evidence
might be brought together to rebut this pos-
sible attempt at detraction, I came upon
what led me to the discovery of the direct
evidence I have promised to lay before you,
in the shape of a clue which brought me,
after a somewhat tortuous course, upon
Walter Warner's actual autograph MS. I
found, whilst following up Dr. Pell's history,
scattered through Dr. Birch's unindexed His-
tory of the Royal Society, that Dr. Birch had
procured a number of MSS. of Mr. Walter
Warner's for that Society mixed up with
Dr. Pell's (see vol. ii. p. 342 ; vol. iv. p. 4+7).
Coupling this statement with the voucher
for Warner's claims, ascribed by Wood and
Aubrey to Dr. Pell (who, however, is never

55

reported in Dr. Birch's History, so far as I
found, to have given currency to this state-
ment), I thought that hy these MSS. I should
be able to test the truth of these statements.
But the librarian of the Royal Society knew
nothing of any MSS., either of Pell's or of
Warner's; and, as the result will show, it
would have been odd if he had — at least, in
his official capacity. 1 then made inquiry
of the Duke of Northumberland, in whose
library the MS. of Warner, once a pensioner
of his house, might possibly be preserved ;
but Mr. J. E. Martin informed me that this
hope was a vain one. I found that Sion
College had once possessed one MS. of War-
ner's ; but I learnt from the Rev. W. W. Mil-
man that they had lost it, and much besides,
in the great fire of London in 1666. Finally,
when taking the register of Merton College
up to the British Museum for the purpose of
comparing the entries made in that volume
during Harvey's wardenship with his one
authentic autograph MS. now in the national
collection, I bethought me of making, at the
same time, some inquiries as to Warner and
Pell ; and at last, when I least expected it,

56

and had nearly ceased to hope for it, I came
upon Walter AVarner's MS., contained in
Dr. Birch's collection (which, according to
him, had been made over to the Royal
Society), under the title, '4394, Birch Collec-
tion,' numbered on in continuation of the
Sloane Collection.

Mr. E. Maude Thompson, by the employ-
ment of various scientific methods, the obser-
vation of which went some way to compen-
sate me for the tedious labour entailed upon
me by the result to which they brought him,
identified the MS. as being really Warner's,
and even in bringing its date down to a
year close upon 16 10, half-a-dozen years or
so, therefore, before Harvey first lectured at
the College of Physicians. The MS. being
thus identified I set myself down to look
through its 4 1 6 folio pages, the average num-
ber of lines in a page being thirty-three or
thirty-four; the average of words, many of
them idle ones, being eight or nine in a line.
I do not think it is very likely that I have
missed any clearer exposition of Warner's
views than the one which I am about to
read from page 138 ; nor do I think that, by

57

choosing it, I can in any way misrepresent
them, for they are stated elsewhere in the
treatise in very much the same words, e.g.
page 1 3 7. These, then, were his views : — ' By
this spontaneall pulsatory motion the bloud
is continually extracted from the vaines
(propter fugam vacui) as well originally
exsuctory as secondarily circulatory and
propelled into the arteries (propter fugam
penetrationis), but with some diversity in the
distribution, some part thereof being pro-
pelled up into the head by the internal
jugular arteries, ad plexum choroideum for
spirito-faction, the rest into all the rest of
the arteries in universum corpus for organo-
faction. Out of that part of the blood that
is propelled by the jugular arteries up to the
head, the spiritus confusus or immersus
thereof being expressed and segregated in
plexu choroidi, either by excussion or exhala-
tion, and animal spirits, thereof made by the
self-operation of the prae-existent in somno,
it is again distributed as before, one portion
thereof being still derived and transmitted to
the heart, ad motum spontaneum pulsationis
ciendum, and so about again, perpetua circu-

58

latione durante fabrica corporeal, and all vio-
lent destructions or impediments abstracted.'
It is, perhaps, needless to dwell further
upon Warner's claims — certainly I do not
propose to trouble you with reading to you
any more of his speculations and conclu-
sions. I have, however, bad a copy made of
folio pages 140, 141, 142, 194, and 195, and,
though the gift may not seem a very valu-
able one, it will enable any fellow of Harvey's
College to satisfy himself abundantly, and
within our own walls, as to the real merits
of the claimant before us, if the College will
allow it to find a place in their library. In
the words of Harvey's favourite poet,

' His saltern neeimmlem ilonis et fungar uiaui
Munere.'

In all seriousness it is something to know
what a contemporary of Harvey, and he a
mathematician of some eminence, could write
only some ten years before the actual demon-
stration of the circulation of the blood was
given to the world.

Let me say, however, that I do not think
it by any means impossible that Harvey may
have read this treatise of Warner's, hard

though the labour of gathering hints, or
rather warnings, from its many guesses
nust have been to him. For in many
parts of Harvey's treatise, De Motu Cordis,
we meet with phrases which seem as if
they had been used with a special refer-
ence to Warner's views ; and his dissertation
has at least this claim upon my grati-
tude, that it has made me think that I
understand Harvey's meaning the better for
having read it. I fancy, in fact, that I re-
cognise sucli phrases in Harvey's words (De
Motu, pp. 58, 61, ed. 1 766 ; p. 56, ed. Willis),
que dolore vel calore vclfugd vacui' and
in such words as ' longe plus est quani par-
tium nutritioni congruens est,' p. 64; 'avro^-la,
non mentis agitatio,' p. 133. He might have
been alluding to almost any page of Warner's
MS. in his repudiation (p. 116, see Epistola
Secunda ad Riolauum) of the hypothesis of
various sorts of spirits. But there is one of
Harvey's many noble and candid, whilst
neasured and well - balanced utterances,
-vhich seems to me to be admirably suited
to serve as a text for an exposition which
perhaps some future Harveian orator may
undertake, of the exact relation which his

60

discoveries held to the knowledge and the
ignorance, not only of Walter Warner, but
of all others of his contemporaries or pre-
decessors. These words run thus (De Motu,
p. 34, ed. 1766 ; p. 33, ed. Willis) : — ' Sed et
hoc' (viz. the transmission of the blood hy
the action of the heart, from the veins into
the arteries, through the ventricles of the
heart into the whole body), ' omnes aliquo
modo concedunt et ex cordis fabrica et val-
vularum artificio positione et usu colligunt.
Verum tanquam in loco obseuro titubautes
caecutire videntur et varia subcontraria et
non cohaerentia componunt et ex conjectura
plurima pronunciant ut ante demonstratum
est.' This may be translated thus : — ' But it
may be said, that all competent persons ac-
cept these views in a more or less modified
form, and have been convinced of the truth
of them from the structure of the heart, and
the contrivance, position, and use of the
valves. But they seem to me to make as
little use of their eyes as men do who are
stumbling about in a dark place, and their
account of the matter is made up of hetero-
geneous, contradictory, and incompatible

statements, and very much of it is pure
guesswork, as I have already shown.' These
words, the Latin ones, not my translation
of them, were published- if not written, nine
s (see p. 5, Harveii Opera, ed. 1766,
Dedicatio) and more after Harvey had first
proved the facts of the circulation, and from
them we gather that his discovery had, even
so early as that date, got out of the stage
in which a discovery is considered to be
untrue, and got into that in which it is said
that everybody knew it before. In no sub-
ject could it have been easier to make out
a plausible case than in this of the circula-
lation of the blood. Piccolhomini (an ac-
quaintance with whom I owe to Mr. Walter
Warner, see his treatise, pp. 194, 200, 201)
had given a diagram, it is there before you \
copied from the copy of his work in our
library, of the junction of the portal and
hepatic twigs, incorrect enough, no doubt,
and obtained by a false method (see Harvey,
Epistola Prima ad Riolanum, p. 105, ed.
1766), but still something in the way of a

1 I have not thought it necessary to reproduce it in a
woodcut.

working hypothesis (see Piccolhomini, Anat.
Praelect. ; Romae, 1 586, p. 1 1 7, and Warner,
MS. p. 194). Servetus had speculated, but
rightly, as to the lesser circulation ; so had
Caesalpinus ; and on Harvey's own showing
(p. 15, and ed. Willis, ed. 1766), Realdus
Columbus ; and Walter Warner, p. 132 (4394
Birch Coll. MS.), had spoken of the heart, in
1610, as being * a mere muscle, very strongly
and artificially woven, and contrived with
omnimodal nerveous fibres, direct, transverse,
and oblike, as it were of purpose, for dilata-
tion and contraction, according to the fashion
of other muscles.' And of the action of the
auriculo - ventricular and arterial valves,
Harvey himself, nived animd, with untar-
nished sincerity, repeatedly (see De Motu,
pp. 14, 51, 53, 67, 81), speaks as of some-
thing known to all men, 'id omnes norunt'
{p. 44). What then, it might have been
triumphantly asked, was there left for Har-
vey to discover, when the action of the
valves of the heart, its muscular character,
and so much else, was already to be found
in the writings or teachings of his prede-
cessors? To all this we can answer, as

63

indeed, it seems probable, was practically
answered even within Harvey's lifetime,
what was left for Harvey to discover was
nothing less than the circulation itself. His
predecessors had but impinged, and that by
guesswork, upon different segments of the
circle, and then gone off at a tangent into
outer darkness, whilst he worked and proved
and demonstrated round its entire periphery.
His demonstrations and direct proofs were
all new, and bis indirect arguments nearly
all new. Whenever he made use of any-
thing already known, be most punctually
acknowledged it. Of bis demonstration in
the way of injection I have already spoken ;
of his demonstration of the use of the valves
in the veins, and his proof that they are
similar in function to the arterial, a fact
previously unsuspected (see p. 65 I. c), the
thirteenth chapter of the treatise De Motu
speaks with figures ; of his indirect, but irre-
fragable argument, in the eighth chapter, from
the quantity of blood thrown out by the
heart at each pulsation, an argument which
a mathematician such as Harriott, or Warner,
might have hit upon, but, so far as I have

64

found, did not, he speaks himself as being
' adeo novum et inauditum ut verear ne
Iiabeam inimicos omnes homines ; ' and
finally, the argument, which though it be
Indirect* every morphologist will allow to
be not only most exquisite, but also most
convincing, for the circulation in the adult
warm-blooded animal, drawn from the re-
lations held by the venae cavae to the ef-
ferent arteries in the embryo, and in all
animals with but a single or an imperfectly
divided ventricle, ' unus duntaxat ventriculus
vel quasi unus,' and of which I would
recommend every one who is not already
acquainted with it, to gain a knowledge
from the seventh chapter of the same book,
was his, and his alone. With regard to all
these points, with regard, that is, to the
circulation as a whole ; with regard to the
actual demonstration and exhibition of it as
opposed to mere guessing about it ; with
regard to all, or nearly all, sound reasoning
as to any large portion of it, Harvey might
have said with Lucretius,

'Avia Pieridum pcragro loea nullius ante
Trita solo.'

or in the words of a poet of another country,
and a later age,

'"We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.'

I do not wish to assert that Harvey was
wholly independent of the works of his pre-
decessors ; he himself would, as his repeated
references to them show, have heen the very
last man to make any such claim for him-
self; nor would I say that he owed nothing
,to the times —

' The Bpacious times of great Elizabeth' —

in which he lived. It is true, I think, in
science, as it is also true in morals and
politics, that the times make great men as
much as great men make the times. Many
metaphors have been used to express this
latter half-truth. Such is the metaphor, an
acquaintance with which I owe to Mr. Pic-
ton's new and striking work The Mystery of
Matter, p. 265, used by St. Augustine, in
which great men are compared to great
mountains, dwelling apart in loneliness, and
sending floods of blessings down upon the
little hills and plains at their feet. Such,

66

again, is the metaphor used by Wordsworth
in apostrophising Milton ■

'Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.' ^

Such is the metaphor used by Sir Coutts
Lindsay, in his poem on the Black Prince,
where a hero

' Stands like a beacon, throwing light far out
Over the rippling tides of centuries.'

Now all these metaphors strive, and profess,
to express but half a truth, and they are
imperfect even for this imperfect purpose,
as they are borrowed from inorganic nature
and the arts, and are unfit to be used as
illustrations of the complexities of life and
thought. I would venture to suggest a me-
taphor which has struck me, during this
investigation, as being more appropriate and
close-fitting, even if less beautiful, than those
which I have quoted. A group of horsemen
are attempting to cross an arm of the sea,
up which the tide has been running, and
obscuring the ridge, or spit of sand, by which
it is fordable. They form themselves into a
line, and advance slowly : rider after rider
flounders off into deep water, and, if wise,
retires towards the rear of the cavalcade of

his companions, who still feel and advance
upon the bottom beneath them. The line by
degrees narrows into a column, and the
column, after a longer interval, narrows into
a single file. To the foremost horseman
courage is necessary, as imagination is to
the discoverer, and, impelled by this feeling,
he may put a wide interval between himself
and his companions, and reaching the opposite
bank long before them, may have leisure to
look down upon them, may be looked up to
by them and by the rest of the world, whilst
for some time in solitary occupation of that
vantage ground. Such I conceive to be a
fair representation, in the way of metaphor,
the best and shortest way, perhaps, of re-
presenting such complex relations, of the
relations held by Harvey, and indeed by
most or all discoverers, to their contem-
poraries, to their compeers, and to the con-
ditions whereby they are surrounded.

It may be expected, perhaps, that, coming
from Oxford, and having been recently
elected a Fellow of the College — the Warden-
ship of which Harvey held for something
more than a year (April 1645 *° midsummer

68

1646) — I should have made search for
whatever records there may be left of him
unpublished in Oxford, and especially in
Merton College. After diligent search, I
have to report that there is but little to be
learned of Harvey's history from any un-
published document which I have been able
to find in Oxford. The Merton College
Register gives the following account of his
election to the Wardenship. In 1645 King
Charles I, after the execution of Archbishop
Laud, took upon himself the functions of
Visitor, and, having removed Sir Nathaniel
Brent from the office of Warden, for having
joined 'the Rebells now in armes against'
him, he directed the Fellows to take the
customary steps for the election of a suc-
cessor. This course consisted in giving in,
after due inquiry, three names to the Visitor,
in order that one of the three, the one we
may suppose it would be understood who
was named first, should be appointed by the
Visitor. Harvey was so named by five out
of the seven Fellows voting ; and, after a
dispute of which it is unnecessary to give
an account, he was duly elected on receipt

of a second letter from the King. A couple
of days after his admission to the office,
on April n, 1645, Harvey summoned the
Fellows into the hall and made a speech to
them, to the effect that it was likely enough
that some of his predecessors had sought
the office of Warden to enrich themselves
therefrom, but that his intentions were quite
of another kind, wishing as he did to in-
crease the wealth and prosperity of the
College m . He finished his address to the
assembled Fellows with an earnest appeal to
them to cherish that mutual concord and
amity amongst themselves, which recent
occurrences, we may suppose, had tended
to weaken. In the other pages of the Re-
gister for the period between April 1 645 and
the midsummer of 1646, I find the name
of Charles Scarborough, the protig& of Har-
vey, and afterwards frequently an officc-

m I wouKI here remark tliat it was well perhaps for
tin' College of Pliysiciiins that Harvey was, by the success
of the Parliament, forced to vacate the office of Warden,
Otherwise he would, no doubt, have kept his word, and
Morion College would have gained what the College of
J'liynk'iiins, or some others of his legatees, would have

70

bearer in this College ; but tfiere is little or
nothing of special interest to us in the rest
of the record, beyond the fact that Harvey
appears to have attended the College meet-
ings and so to have discharged his duties,
amongst which the providing for the con-
tingency of a siege and famine was one.
Mr. Pettigrew (Medical Portrait Gallery,
1 840) has put on record the fact that Har-
vey's signature is to be found in the Liber
Computorum of Merton. The College Re-
gister, however, is not so enriched, as I can
state upon the authority of Mr. E. Maude
Thompson, who compared the pages relating
to Harvey's wardensliip with the autograph
MS. in the British Museum, when I took
the Register up to London for that pur-
pose n .

n Mr. E. M. Thompson lias made another search for
Harvey's missing ?rS. He Ana(omi;i Cniversa, which Dr.
Lawrence mentions nt p. xxxi. of his Harveii Vita (ed.
1766), and which Dr. Willis tells us at p. vii. of his
Preface (ed. Willis) had then (1847) been twice looked
for in vain. Mr. Thompson's sea roll IniK also been equally
fruitless ; he writes to me thus, under date June 3, 1873 : —
' Harvey's Anatomy was once upon a time iu the British
Museum. In the first volume of the old MS. Catalogue of

Of Harvey's, as of Berkeley's sojourn in
Oxford, we know little; little, indeed, has

the Sloanc MSS. (now marked Sloane MS. 3972 A), there
is this entry on p. 57 : —

"C."ff^",— I'mdi-rtiuiips nmitoitiicae univei'sules |ier me,
Uulk-liuum Ilai'vtuii'i modicum Lundinensem Anatom. et
Chirurg. Professor. Anno Dnm. 1616, aetatis 37, praelect.
April 1, 1617."

To which is added, "This is the author's foundation and
first Lecture of the circulation in his own handwriting,"
and opposite to it is this note by Sir F. Madden, " In the
place of 230 (which seems missing) Ayscough substituted
the bracketed no. (6)." So you will see from this that
the MS. was missing in Ayscough's time. I have ran-
sacked our MSS. without finding any clue; so I think
you may make up your mind that it was borrowed, and
has gone the way of borrowed books in general. — E.
Maude Thompson.' Wood says (Fasti Osonienses, ii. 6)
of Harvey, 'But more in MSS. hath he left behind him, .
the titles of which you may see in the Epist. Dedicat.
before a Historical Account of the Colleges Proceedings
against Empyrieks' (1684, London, Ch. Goodall). Moved
by this authority, though Goodall only says that Harvey
designed those treatises, I looked over a large number of
medical MSS., assisted herein by Mr. Walter de Gray
Birch, in the Slonno Collection of the British Museum,
without tlie desired result. Subsequently I found that
Harvey himself in 165a (p. 163 and p. 502, ed. 1766;
and pp. 481, 482, ed. WilliB) had recorded the loss
'adversaria nmltorum annorum laborious jjarta,'
and especially of his work De Generntione Insectorum,
when hia house was plundered in the Civil War. Later

72

been recorded, with the exception of the
somewhat uncertain gossip of the gossiping
Aubrey. But what we do know of the place
during those years which elapsed between
the battle of Edgehill and 1646, makes us
certain that scientific, and indeed any other
work, must have been earned on in it under
great disadvantages. We read of the plague,
and of the 'morbus campestris,' described
by a former Harveian orator and Linacre
lecturer as desolating the town and driving
people out of residence. It was, besides, a
centre for military operations; and military
life has been shown, by the experience of
all ages (though this experience appears to
have been lost upon the heedlessness and
ignorance of this), to be out of harmony
with the habits of men, old as was Harvey
then (act. 64-68), young as our under-
graduates are now, who are, or who ought

again I came upon the follow! ii£ passu;*' in Lower's
work, Tractiitua tie Corde, ed. 1669 : 'Quid quod et Har-
veius si per aetatem et otium licuisset plura polliceri vide-

tur ipse, Lib. de Cimtlat. Sanguinis, tap. 9 Seil

q>md maxime dolendum est et ills nolo suu et

nostra excidiirws.' Hence I fear there is now little hope

either of recovering or of discovering the lost MS.

73

to be devoted to study. Whatever else of
Aubrey's tales of Harvey I may disbelieve,
T can believe that the words addressed to
Charles Scarborough, ' Prithee leave off thy
gunning and stay here,' arc his.

If, however, we wish to have a real and
truthful picture and image of Harvey before
us, we must do by him as we have to do by
Shakespeare, by Aristotle, by Butler, and
several other great writers : we must lay
our minds alongside of his, as it is revealed
to us in his works. It is only the writings
of great men which will bear or repay such
treatment: no commentary nor any bio-
graphy can give us the real and vivid sensa-
tion of having the men before us which we
get from a perusal and reperusal of their
books. Having used for this purpose what
Mr. Tom Taylor has recently spoken of" as
' the invaluable three hours before breakfast,'
I have come to persuade myself that I have
obtained something like a trustworthy idea
of what Harvey really was. Previously, how-
ever, to doing this, I gave Christian burial to

1 See speech at Eighty-fourth Anniversary Dinner of the
Ruyal Literary Fun J, ' Times/ Thursday, May 29, p. 12.

74

much of what Aubrey has left on record
about him, feeling more and more strongly
as I grew better acquainted with Harvey
that —

' These were slanders : never yet
"Was noble mini 'but ina.de ignoble talk.'

I will speak first of his scientific character,
though it may seem strange to speak of
scientific character, as character implies, per-
haps, a moral element ; and science, so far
as it is really science, and based exclusively
upon sound reasoning, has no moral element
in it; reasoning, so long as it is sound,
being of one kind always, and devoid there-
fore of all distinctive or personal factors. It
is necessary for me to say that I do not
forget that Harvey was hut eighteen years
junior to Bacon,

1 Whom a wise king and Nature chose
Lord Chancellor of both their laws. 1

But neither do I forget that the Novum
Organon was published in 1620, subse-
quently to the discovery and actual de-
monstration of the circulation (see Dedicatio
to the treatise De Motu Cordis), if not to the
publication of the treatise on the Motion of

75

the Heart ; and that the Royal Society, with
its motto, 'Nullius addictus jurare in verba
magistri,' was a foundation of a much later
date. And consequently, I think, we may feel
justified in saying that, so far as the purely
scientific factor of a man's nature can be
said to have any distinctive or personal cha-
racter at all, independence, or robustness,
or manliness, whichever word we may
like to choose, as shown in superiority to
mere authority and the weight of great
names, was a distinctive character of Har-
vey as a man of science. With Riolanus
in full vigour, and Van der Linden growing
towards maturity, as champions of antiquity,
it required not a little manliness to assert,
1 contra receptas vias per tot saecula anno-
rum ab innumeris iisque clarissirais doc-
tissimisque viris' (Riolanus was often thus
spoken of), 'tritam atque illustratam' (De
dicatio, p. 5), the claims of simple Nature
'qua nihil antiquius majorisve auctoritatis '
(Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum, p. 123).
This element of real manliness shows itself
again, I think, in Harvey's power of ab-
staining from suggesting a rationale of what

he felt he did not understand ; as, for ex-
ample, in what is known (out of England,
at least) as the ' Problem of Harvey ' (see
De Partu, pp. 132, 549, ed. 1766; p. 530, ed.
Willis) — a problem which, I think, could
not have been answered till the ' works and
days ' of Bernard P ; and in the cases of

P I refer to Claude Bernard's experiments on the in-
fluence of vitiated air (Des Effets des Substantia Toxiques
ct medicaiuenteuses, 1857, p. 125), which show so plainly
that organisms can attain ;i power of tolerance as against
morbific agencies if time is allowed them to become
gradually adjusted to such environment. The principle
demonstrated in these experiments has been brought into
greater prominence by Sir James Paget in his striking
account (Lancet, June 3, 1871; p. 734), so interesting
to ail of us for other than purely scientific reasons, of his
serious illness in 1871. As regards the 'Problem of
Harvey,' the foetus in utero lias been habituated to lowly
arterhdised blood ; the blood of the umbilical vein is not
scarlet in colour, and hence, I submit, may be explained
the tolerance by a child which has come into the world
Imt has not yet breathed in it, of conditions which entail
death by suffocation in a child which, having breathed air,
is exposed to them. Tins pliysi'iIoL'ieal principle has,
among many other practical bearings, the practical value of
furnishing an answer to the 1'hilistiue argument so often
brought forward by Antisanitarians in favour of the re-
tention of abuseB, in the words ' see to what a good old
age people live in the middle of it all !' The answer is,

77

several other problems instanced by him-
self (p. 132, Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum),
and hidden then, to use his own metaphor
{p. 630, ed. 1766; p. 613, ed. Willis, Epistola
Prima ad Horstium), in the "well of Demo-
critus.

For the culture which Harvey had be-
stowed upon his literary faculties, we have
better evidence than Aubrey's, better even
than that of two more trustworthy witnesses
than Aubrey — Bishop Pearson, to wit, and
Sir William Temple : we have the evidence
of his own writings as to his familiarity
with one of the greatest writers of antiquity.
Bishop Pearson, as Dr. George Paget has
reminded us (see p. 15 of his Notice of an
Unpublished Manuscript of Harvey, 1850),
writing in 1664, but seven years after
Harvey's death, and Aubrey (see p. Ixxxii. of
Life by Dr. Willis, prefixed to the Sydenham
Society's edition of his works, 1847), have

"They have become habituated, and are living in spite of,
not because of these surroundings : immigrants die' in the
process of acclimatisation.' Such persons, au<t indeed all
persons, may read with profit Mr. G. H. Lewes' Physio-
logy of Common Life, vol. i. pp. 372-377, upon this

told us of Harvey's high appreciation of
Aristotle's writings ; but in his own writings
lie refers to the Stagirite more frequently,
I think, than to any other individual. And,
as regards Vergil (the Latin author whom
probably, if hut one Latin classical writer
could be saved from destruction, most men
would choose to be that one, as Aristotle
probably would be the similarly to be chosen
Greek), Sir William Temple {Miscellanies,
Part ii, On Poetry, p. 314) has told us that
' the famous Dr. Harvey, when he was read-
ing Virgil, would sometimes throw him
down upon the table and say he had a
devil.' It was a similar spirit which dwelt
in Sir Philip Sidney, who never heard the
famous ballad of Percy and Douglas with-
out feeling his 'heart moved more than
with a trumpet'

It may seem to some but a small matter to
vindicate for our great discoverer claims to a
familiarity with Greek ; still, any one who will
look at such passages as the one in the Exerci-
tatio de Partu, p. 553, where he speaks of the
mischief done by meddlesome midwives, or
other passages (pp. 116, 129, and 133, Epi-

7!)

stola Secunda ad Riolanum ; p. 613, Ep. ad
yegelium), will see, I think, that he had
Greek in abundance at his command, and
used it just when it helped him to express
his thoughts more clearly and concisely
han any other words at hand at the mo-
nent. He used it, in fact, like a man of
sense and real learning, when the use of it
ivould save him time or trouble— two things,
of one of which he had all too little, whilst
of the other he had all too much for his
nd our good. Let me add that, in the one
authentic MS. which we now possess of
arvey's (No. 486, Sloane Coll., British
Museum), a MS. never intended for publica-
tion, and consisting but of rough notes for
lectures to be delivered, I find that he
employs Greek words in several places (e.g.
pp. 65, 66 and 87) 1.

1 I have no sympathy with (hi' Oiittevnos which scien-
ten sometimes (see Fritz M filter, Fiir Darwin, p. 28 ;
' Engl. Trans, p. 42) show in repudiating a know-
e of Greek, hut on the other hand I should he sorry
1 he thought to overrate its value. I am so far from
ing this that I incliue to thinking that, when through
int of leisure or of means, or through some other de-
ficiency, a young man cannot add on more than a second

80

His style has boon spoken of as being more
or less inelegant and unadorned ; and the
Latin tongue which he used lends itself but
grudgingly and awkwardly to the purposes
of science, being strictly a political language,
habituated and framed to describe the
inarch of the legions, the disputes of the
forum, or the denunciations of the moralist.
Still, Harvey's style has always an impres-
siveness and solidity of its own ; and some-
times, as for example in the glorious eighth
chapter, De Motu Cordis, it rises into real
eloquence where a great occasion justifies
the use of repetitions, of antitheses, and
abundance of metaphors. But, though the
use of stilted phraseology was common
enough among Harvey's contemporaries,
and though his imagination was vivid and
active enough, his study (for to this perhaps
we may ascribe it) of the excellent models
mentioned saved him, as such a study can

foreign language to bis acquirement of I^tin (which I
presuppose), that second foreign language should, in the
case of Englishmen, be, for linguistic and educational, as
well as for more lowly practical reasons, not Greek hut
German.

save a man, from falling into the use of false
or extravagant imagery.

Harvey, besides the advantages accruing
from acquaintance with the great minds of
the past, enjoyed also those which may be
gotten from familiar intercourse with great
contemporary minds. These advantages
constitute in themselves a second educa-
tion ; and they were at Harvey's command
for the period of more than forty years during
which he was prominently before the public.
It is recorded as one of the many distinc-
tions of John Greaves (see Life, by T. Smith,
1699, p. 44), the once celebrated astronomer
and antiquary, and a man whom we can
well believe to have done more, as a Fellow
of Merton, than give a silent vote for Harvey
when he was chosen Warden, that he was
one of the friends of Harvey as well as of
Archbishops Laud and Usher. It is indeed

a letter to this latter dignitary, and in
answer, we may suppose, to an appeal from
him on behalf of Harvey, that we And John
Greaves pledging himself in a postscript,
under date Sept. 19, 1644, the year before

■vey's election as Warden of Merton, to

the following effect: 'If I may serve Dr.
Harvy (sic) I shall be most ready either
here or at Leyden to do it.' (See Life of
James Usher by Richard Parr, D.D., 1686,
p. 510P). His well-known connexion with

c I owe thia last reference to the Eiographia Britan-
nica, sub. voc. Greaves. For a further account see Wood's
Athenae Oxonienses, vol. iii. ed. Bliss, 1817. To the
former of these sources I owe a second and more interest-
ing reference, viz. to Birch's edition, 1737, of the Miscel-
laneous "Works of John Greaves, where, at the end of
Greaves' Treatise on the Pyramids (pp. 136, 137), we
have given us an account of a conversation between him
and Harvey. It runs thus : ' That I and my company
should have continued so many hours in the Pyramid
and live (whereas we found no inconvenience) was much
wondered at by Dr. Harvey, his majesty's learned physician.
For, said he, seeing we never breathe the same air twice,
but still new air is required to a new respiration (the
succtis olibilix of it being spent in every expiration), it
could cot he but by long breathing we should have spent
the aliment of that small stock of air within, and have
been stifled ; unless there were some secret tunnels con-
veying it to the top of the Pyramid whereby it might pass
out and make way for fresh air to come in at the entrance
below.' The Fellow of Mertou was not wanting in an
answer to the future Warden, assuring him, amongst much
else not wholly correct, that 'as for any tubuli to let
out the fuliginous air at the top of the Pyramid, none
could be discovered within or without.' Harvey replied,
'they might be so small as that they could not easily be

the court must have constantly brought
him Into relation with the statesmen of those
stormy times. His legacy to his ' good friend
Mr. Thomas Hobbs, to buy something to
keepe in remembrance' of him, is touching,
even if trifling, evidence in the same direction.
Travel, which even in our day confers a
nd of culture peculiar to itself, must have

discerned, and yet might be sufficient to make way for
air, being a thin and subtil body.' It has, indeed,
i left to our own times and to v. Pettenkofer to de-
monstrate and exhibit the action of the capillary pores
1 the constituents of a mass of 'solid' masonry (see hia
Jeziehungen der Luft zu Kleiduug, "Wohnung und Boden,
187a, pp. 41-45, and especially the figures p. 42). What
eeuwenhoek and Malpighi did for the capillaries of the
mal body in supplementation of Harvey's work, and
in correction of one of bis few errors, that v. Pettenkofer
s done in supplementation of Harvey's suggestion as to
'tubuli so small as that they could not easily be discerned '
1 structures like the Pyramids. It is, perhaps, not more
iub to note that Harvey was equally right in sug-
ing the existence of larger ' secret tunnels' : an account
f the discovery and opening of them may be found in
.\jlonelHowa]\lYyse's Operations carried on at thePjTamids
if Gizeh, 1837, i. pp. 3, 263, 385-288 ; ii. 160, 161; and
o amusing history of the inconveniences endured in the in-
L rior of tlii; Pyramids previously to flip discovery of these
*ir-channels ' is given by Colonel Coutelle in Description
e I'Egypte, Antiquites, Memoires, ii. 46, 1809.

been doubly necessary in days when, in the
absence of the steamship and the railway,
an insular position must have kept its in-
habitants very nearly as inaccessible to ' the
thoughts that move mankind,' as it had hap-
pily kept them to the Armada. Sir George
Knt's interesting and entirely trustworthy
account of the interview with Harvey which
resulted in the publication of the treatise
De Generations will show any one who will
consult it that Harvey had drawn from his
opportunities an insight into what might be
expected, and what since his time to some
extent has been realised, from enlarged
opportunities of observing not only 'men,
manners, cities, climates, governments,' but
also the wonderful facts of the unequal allot-
ment, in the various parts of the earth, of
useful inorganic products, and of that mys-
tery of mysteries, the distribution of organic
life. (See Works, ed. 1766, p. 162 ; ed.
Dr. Willis, p. 146.)

Having been thus fortunate in securing
for himself all the advantages which the
various educational agencies of his age
would furnish, he added on to all that they

85

had effected, or could effect, the yet more
elevating and glorious discipline of long sus-
tained and finally successful labour. He
attained a position of mental dignity in
which he could feel neither unduly anxious
for the applause of his compeers, nor unduly
moved by the reproaches and misrepresen-
tations of his enemies (see Dedicatio, p. 164 ;
Epistola Secunda ad Riolanum, p. 109) ;
the impact of these opposite forces result-
ing, however, in much benefit for mankind,
as 'without them Harvey might, it is likely
enough, have delayed the publication of his
works indefinitely. Being self-contained
without being self-conscious, he was yet,
like all men of real genius, large-hearted
and sympathetic. Whilst he could, in a
spirit of perhaps a little overstrained cha-
rity, make excuses (see p. 614, Epistola ad
Slegelium) for the pestilent and irrepressible
Riolanus, he would, we may be also sure,
have felt an emotion of gratitude upon each
of the many instances in which his own
true-hearted adherents, Sir George Ent and
other Fellows of this College, fought his
battles for him, and vindicated for him sue-

cessfully and during his own lifetime his
own irrefragable claims. And I can believe
that, answering to the character of the dig-
nified, stately, and high-minded man so well
drawn by the author whom he often quotes
(Aristotle, Eth. Nic. iv. 3(7)), and consider-
ing himself worthy of great respect, being
worthy of it, he would not have looked dis-
approvingly upon our attempt to show him
respect by the Tercentenary Memorial to
which you, Sir, have lent the sanction of
your name. I can further conceive of Har-
vey as entirely sympathising with the men
who have now in their hands the torch of
knowledge which once passed through his,
of applauding without any shadow of jealousy
the work of the many workers who in these
days are going over the ground trodden by
him under far less favourable circumstances
and with far less assistance from ancillary <i

1 Such an experiment, for example, as that put on
record by Professor Haughton (Principles of Animal
Mechanics, 1873, p. 151), as performed by Professor
Hacnaniara with his assistance, and as showing that the
time occupied by absorption, circulation, and secretion
occupies less than four minutes, requires the employment
of iodine ; and iodine has been discovered and isolated
but some sixty-two years.

S7

sciences and their various and still novel
instruments and methods. The same spirit
which caused him repeatedly to say (as, for
example, to Sir George Ent, p. 163; to
Horstius, p. 630), 'liaec cum mira, ut solet,
promptitudine effundens,' that he doubted
not that much now hidden in darkness
ivould be brought to light by the inde-
fatigable industry of the coming age ; the

ne spirit which dictated the provision in
his will bidding 'his lo. friend Mr. Doctor
Ent' sell certain of his 'books, papers, or
rare collections,* and, ' with the money buy
better,' would have caused him, could he
have been amongst us, to point out, as a
matter for congratulation, in how many di-
rections his discoveries had been extended
and added to, and how well replaced had
been the many works the loss of which had
been so 'crucifying' to him,

There was not in Harvey's mind that
defect in the way of a deficiency of interest
in theological questions which constitutes
in the minds of some eminent scientific,
and some eminent literary, men such a
lamentable void. He has, on the contrary,

in several places taken pains to state his
views upon this highest of subjects. To one
of these passages (from the work De Gene-
ration Exercit. Quinquagesima, p. 385, ed.
1766; p. 370, ed. Dr. Willis), as Mr. E. B.
Tylor has pointed out to me, Professor His
of Leipzig, a worker whom Harvey would
have hailed as a colleague, has referred
in one of his always excellent papers,
published in the Archiv fiir Anthropologic,
Bd. iv. 1870, p. 220, on 'Die Theorien der
geschlechtlichen Zeugung.' It is just in the
investigation of the problems indicated in
these last words that, as has often been
remarked, the question of the existence of
other than purely material forces presses
itself most closely upon the mind ; and
hence, perhaps, the repetition by Harvey of
his views regarding it, more than once or
even twice, in his treatise just referred to
(see Exercit. 49, p. 730 ; Ex. 50, p. 385 ; Ex.
54, pp. 419, 420). These statements are all
to the same purpose. I have chosen one of
them — the last one of the three just cited
(uot the one quoted by Professor His)— to
repeat here, because, besides its philoso-

phical and other interest, it has some literary
claims upon our attention, it being not quite
impossible, considering its line of thought
and arrangement of words, that Pope, who
borrowed on all sides, and made acknow-
ledgments on none, may have had it before
him when he composed his Universal Prayer.
It runs thus : —

- Nempe agnoscimus Deum, Creatorem
summum atque omnipotentem, in cuncto-
rum animalium fabrica ubique praesentem
esse, et in operibus suis quasi digito mon-
strari; Cujus in procreatione pulli instru-
menta sint gallus et gallina. Constat quippe
in generatione pulli ex ovo omnia singulari
providentia, sapientia divinS,, artificioque
admirabili et incomprehensibili exstructa ac
efformata esse. Nee cuiquam sane haec at-
tributa conveniunt, nisi omnipotenti rerum
principio ; quocunque demum nomine id ip-
sum appellare libuerit : sive mentem divi-
nam cum Aristotele ; sive cum Platone
Animam mundi ; aut cum aliis Naturam
naturantem; vel cum Ethnicis Saturnum
aut Jovem ; vel potius, ut nos decet, Crea-
torem ac patrem omnium quae in coelis et

90

terris; a quo animalia eorumque origines
dependent, cujusque nutu sive effato fiunt
et generantur omnia.' (De Generatione Ani-
mation], Ex. 54, pp. 419, 420, ed. 1766; p. 402,
ed. Willis.)

I have detained you far too long; but,
feeling that my praise of Harvey has been
all too feeble, I am anxious, in ending, to
employ in honour of Harvey certain lines of
singular beauty and force which, though
composed in commemoration not- of him, but
of another famous Englishman, may never-
theless be applied to him with a singular
appropriateness.

' Remember all
He spoke among you, and the man who spoke ;
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with Eternal God for power ;
"Who let the turbid streams of rumour flow
Thro' either babbling world of high and low ;
Whose life was work, whose language rife
With rugged maxims hewn from life ;
Who never spoke against a foe.

Whatever record leap to light,
He never shall be shamed.'